Solid Bronze is a duo comprised of Ian Everett & George Miller. Their debut album The Fruit Basket is out in the world and was produced by Dean Ween as well as Chris Harford. A love of deep soul and funk permeates through the recordings. The vibrant tracks function quite well in a vacuum but also lend themselves to creating some electric samples for potential hip hop records in the future too. LM2’s Dylan Bowker spoke with Ian Everett (vocals, guitar, and bass) about all things Solid Bronze.
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For Everett, his early musical tastes were shaped by a few local influences in his community. Everett said, “My favorite record store in the country is in Princeton which is right near where I grew up. Princeton Record Exchange, I started going there when I was in high school and really getting into music. So I found a lot of stuff through there. Growing up around the Trenton area just a lot of punk rock shows and stuff. Mostly at a church….That was the spot we used to hit up back in the day when it was starting to get going.”
The genre focus has always shifted but the communal aspects of music always drew Everett in. Everett stated, “That’s an ever-changing thing I think as well. But I think being younger and discovering punk music and seeing kids that like you go to high school with also making music that you think is cool. It started like an interest in the community aspect of it.”
When Everett made the connections between funk music and hip hop sampling, he figured out a great lane to thrive in. Everett quipped, “I think from like a producer perspective maybe that’s where I find more of an interest. Realizing the stuff that I listen to when I got into music like Jay Z and all of the mid 90’s Tupac and all of that stuff….Finding out later on in life that it was really all just samples of funk music. That was a big realization when I found out about what sampling really was too. I was like ‘man, if we can make music that can eventually be sampled in the same way it covers a lot of ground’…..They can hear it through another completely different genre of music.”
Solid Bronze
The learning curve is always there for Everett who took away some important lessons from putting together this last record. Everett said, “I learned about the importance of drum and rhythmic instruments in a song by recording with George and finding out that’s how he thinks in a song.”
The record features some great collaborations too. They did a Lee Scratch Perry dub mix collab and also have Kidd Funkadelic collabs too. Everett stated, “That still kind of blows my mind to think about because that was like somebody that I’ve listened to for such a long time (Kidd Funkadelic). Really that came about through working with Dean Ween and him….He’s on a few songs on the album as well.”
The pace for cutting The Fruit Basket was also quite relaxed and went down over a meaningful period of time. Everett quipped, “It was based on everyone’s schedules because we were working with Nicky, Dean Ween, and our other friend and producer Chris Harford……We were just kind of just fitting in these sessions when we could. So it ended up being like once a month for around a year. The four of us would meet up and kind of knock out one aspect of it….It was around once a month that it sort of went down.”
The Fruit Basket
Though more musicians have been brought in to flesh out live shows, the nucleus of the band is still centered on the two that started it. Everett said, “The band is still sort of run by George and I. I think that’s pretty much just keeping things simple. Two people making a decision versus five is much easier. We never really wanted to do anything live as a two-piece. So finding band members was all sort of part of what we were getting into a little bit. It’s been sort of slow but it is coming together. It’s the first time we’ve really one it like that….Cool how it can happen live.”
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